We spent our last day in Brugge just wandering again! This city is really so interesting and beautiful, and since it was a little rainy today everything was a little quieter than usual. So it was perfect for a last bit of exploring!
There was a beautiful open market set up in the Grote Markt today. It's their usual Wednesday farmer's market I think. Anyway, there were so many stalls full of beautiful fruits and vegetables, cheeses and cured meats, flowers, prepared foods, etc. It was really fun to wander around and see what was available!
Kind of cool to see the market with these beautiful statues and buildings in the background!
While out wandering, we decided to take in the Groeningemuseum, which is the most important art museum in Brugge. Its website says, "The permanent collection provides a rich and interesting overview of six centuries of the visual arts in the Southern Netherlands (which roughly corresponds to present-day Belgium)." I really enjoyed it a lot! Art museums are one of my favorite things to visit in big cities, even though I don't know anything except the little I learned in an art history class 20+ years ago in college. I would love to spend a semester in Paris or Florence and really study art history in depth with someone who is a true expert in the field! I'll add that to my bucket list for future trips! :-) (FYI - I've just started reading Inferno, the new thriller by Dan Brown - the guy who wrote The DaVinci Code - and it's really making me want to head back to Florence, Italy!)
Here are just a few random pics of some of the pieces I liked. They had a temporary exhibition of a current female artist, and her modern pieces were really cool! It was really neat to see these very contemporary pieces juxtaposed with ones from hundreds of years ago.
This picture is of a man being flayed as a punishment for some crime. The note underneath the painting said these kind of pieces used to hang in the courtrooms and administrative buildings to remind judges and magistrates to always do their best in "administering the city and dispensing justice." Can you imagine that hanging in a U.S. courtroom?! :-)
This is supposed to be Mary Magdalene. And what was really interesting is that in the piece hanging next to this one, the same woman was depicted as Mary, mother of Jesus, in a scene with Jesus and Joseph.
The next three pics are from that contemporary artist! I love the middle green and yellow one!
This is the Holy Trinity. I've never quite seen God depicted this way. He reminds me of images I've seen of church officials in other paintings. Interesting.
This scene depicts the death of Lord Byron, one of my favorite English poets. He died in Greece at age 36.
This is a really cool one called "The Invention of Drawing," and it shows the woman leaning over the man and tracing his shadow on the wall with a paint brush. It's really very beautiful! The light and shadows were striking!
This one is my favorite, and it's called "Life's Sunset." The lines on their faces are so thought provoking and beautiful. And the sweetness of their joined hands just touched my heart!
And my last favorite is a 20th century, modern version of "The Last Supper." It's very similar to the arrangement we usually see of this religious scene, but the faces and hands look very different than what we've seen in Da Vinci's famous painting. I love that it takes something so famous and remakes it into something very different,all while retaining the familiarity.
We also swung by that really awesome chocolate shop from our first day in Brugge and bought four more very strange combinations to sample.
The upper left in the pic is an apple. It tasted exactly like a sweet apple AND it included a little caramel! Perfect!
The fried onion chocolate was really interesting. It had the flavor of those crispy fried onions you put on green been casserole! It was really tasty!
The chili chocolate in the lower left was a bit disappointing. There was no heat at all. Maybe it was supposed to be a sweet chili?
And the bright lime green one was a chocolate mint, but it wasn't the strong, fake peppermint flavor that's usually paired with chocolate. This one was a really subtle fresh mint taste. In fact it had little pieces of mint (the leaf) in it! Yum!
Our last stop before heading back to the hotel was an Apothecary (pharmacy) because I have three big mosquito bites on my forehead and cheek! (We made the mistake of leaving the window open in the room the first night, and there are mosquitos because of the canals. They certainly thought I was very tasty!) The pharmacist was very nice, and we used our Google Translate app to help her understand what we needed. Tammy said I should just point to my mosquito bites, but I figured she would just think I had bad acne and give me some facial cleanser! LOL :-) (FYI - Google Translate is the handiest app ever! I so wish we'd had it on all our other trips to foreign countries!)
Now we're off to do a little laundry downstairs, and then we're leaving for Bastogne tomorrow (Battle of the Bulge sights). We've had three days of lovely relaxation here in Brugge, but now it's back to WWI and WWII for a few days! I can't wait!
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